How Eveready’s ROI jumped 526 percent in less than 6 months?

MUMBAI, INDIA: The global BI market is slated to grow to $26.78 billion by 2019 as per Research & Markets while the Indian market alone is expected to touch $150 million in 2015.

With disruptive technologies such as SMAC, the market has shifted towards self-service, cloud and analytics applications better suited for enterprises.

Secondly, in order to achieve the desired speed and agility, businesses are adopting cloud services like Salesforce, Workday, and Google Analytics. Another major trend is widening of access to analytics which help enterprises to use self-service tools to empower their employees to analyze and derive insights without going to a separate team, thus improving on time efficiency and better decision making, shares Deepak Ghodke, Country Manager, India, Tableau.

He demonstrates how large enterprises such as Eveready, Ashok Leyland and Marico benefitted with business intelligence.

How Eveready’s ROI jumped 526 percent in less than 6 months?
The company already had a data warehouse to store data generated from its ERP system, supply chain management and Salesforce systems.

Overall, the company had huge amount of data which was mostly stored in their Oracle database. In addition, it also had some financial data stored in Microsoft Excel worksheets.

Eveready initially started using Tableau to primarily analyze its sales data. The company’s 52-member strong sales team started by using Tableau to track sales data such as planned versus actual sales, Year on Year (YoY) growth rates, sales trends, profitability of each Line of Business and geographical distribution of sales. Additionally, the team used the software to study trends relating to customer buying patterns, cash-credit ratios, and more.

Next, Eveready extended the use of the BI software to its supply chain team, which enabled it to get a real-time view into inventory from adherence to stocking norms to tracking materials in transit.

The greatest benefit of BI has been the ease of use and user adoption which has exceeded all expectations of return on investment as Eveready has seen 526 percent ROI in less than 6 months.

What helped Ashok Leyland slice and dice its important data?
Ashok Leyland was using other BI tools for its reporting capabilities, but these tools had limitations in terms of providing a dashboard facility that the business was looking for.

Rather than a transactional, hygiene reporting tool, the company was scouting for a self-service BI tool that would provide allow a user to slice and dice data which was 10x to 100x valuable than its IT investments.

Consequently, Ashok Leyland deployed the Tableau Server for publishing interactive workbooks. The server allows the firm to control access regionally so users see only the information they are permitted. Using the server, the company is also able to ensure data security, which is extremely critical.

How did Marico standardize its reporting structure?
The senior management of Marico depended on daily sales reporting sent through emails. But lack of standardization and inaccuracies plagued these manually created reports, and even the management got precious little in terms of value. Having sales performance information readily available on a daily basis was a challenge, especially for the top management.

Tableau helped Marico present the visualized data to teams across organizations, and this has helped drive a change. It offered easy-to-consume and highly customized dashboards/reports (updated with the latest data) to the company’s decision-makers.

Today, Marico uses the BI tool to analyze a large amount of data on retail behavior, sales and marketing, inventory movement and procurement of key inputs, allowing them to gain detailed insights into the company’s performance.

With Tableau deployed, Marico now has standardized reports in a clean PDF format and customized dashboards with vizzes reflecting the insights to set KPIs for managers.